CRISIS COMMUNICATION DURING HEALTH CRISES: THE CASE OF CANADIAN OFFICIALS’ SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Authors

Hossein Azarpanah, Concordia UniversityFollow
Mohsen Farhadloo, Concordia UniversityFollow
Rustam Vahidov, Concordia UniversityFollow

Paper Number

1084

Abstract

To effectively manage a health crisis, citizens need to have shared Situational Awareness (SA) of the crisis. This study proposes that the public draws upon shared mental models of the crisis to achieve shared SA. Declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge bases comprise the essential aspects of shared mental models of mission-critical situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, public officials must provide a constant flow of crisis declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge on social media. This study investigates Canadian officials’ presence on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing a dataset of 213,089 Canadian officials’ tweets shows that their presence was either for health crisis management (73.26%) or crisis-related topics (46.66%). Declarative (72.03%), procedural (38.1%), and strategic knowledge (30.18%) comprised 96% of the health crisis management tweets. This study informs research and practice by analyzing the essential role of knowledge types in creating a shared SA in managing health crises.

Recommended Citation

Azarpanah, Hossein; Farhadloo, Mohsen; and Vahidov, Rustam, "CRISIS COMMUNICATION DURING HEALTH CRISES: THE CASE OF CANADIAN OFFICIALS’ SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC" (2022). ECIS 2022 Research-in-Progress Papers. 4.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2022_rip/4